How to Make Your Forum Not Welcoming to Women

The Skeptics Guide to the Universe is a podcast and panel of skeptics “dedicated to promoting critical thinking, reason, and the public understanding of science through online and other media.” I don’t know about the demographics of the listening audience, but a cursory stroll through the discussion board audience via threads on the forum reveals that by far the majority of posters are men. A stroll through the blogosphere reveals that there are far more skeptics who are men than women, to the point that the conversation frequently revolves around how to involve more women. (Hence this blog.) A recent uproar reveals that it is such a point of concern that too few women have registered for The Amazing Meeting 2012 that the president of the hosting organization (James Randi Educational Foundation) attributed this decline to women bloggers discussing the unfriendly environment women encounter in real-life and online communities. In fact, one specific woman blogger, Rebecca Watson–SGU panelist and podcaster–was named as especially responsible and she has decided to sit out this event to make a point.

Because it must be the women warning other women about potential opportunities for personal and online harassment who scare the women away (and maybe it is) and not at all the fault of the people (usually men) harassing women in person and online. Or the behavior of skeptical leaders big and small that sets the tone for what kind of behaviors general members can engage in, how they will be tolerated, and what women can expect.

For example, the moderators of the SGU Forums feel free to fight against the women who are trying to make skepticism a more welcoming place for women, and so the forum itself has become a place where people can go to fight women who are trying to reduce misogyny and sexism in the skeptical community. And you get gems of threads like this one…

…which turns into a screed against Rebecca Watson in which at least two moderators (one is the administrator) participate, and includes commentary like this:

You used to be right all the time, back when you were a skeptic who promoted feminism. But lately, now that you’re a feminist who targets inequalities in skepticism, you have been harder and harder for us folks who are still in it for the woo-bashing to follow and agree with.

I hypothesize that you see it as personal evolution. But for those of us who haven’t evolved the way you have, we see it as bridge-burning. You are burning bridges, and then you bad-mouth the people who didn’t follow you across the bridge. It should come as no surprise that the members of this board perceive you the way they — we — do. In fact, it would be irrational to expect otherwise.

(Emphasis mine. Except for the “we” inside the em-dashes. Those italics are in the original. Must fully disclose, you know.)

So you’ve got your head moderator–your board administrator, in fact–letting women know that it’s OK to be a feminist, but if you are the kind of feminist who burns bridges by targeting inequalities and criticizing sexism and misogyny (the bad-mouthing), you cannot expect support. Your board administrator emphasizes that he will not support you. That it would be irrational (ergo, not worthy of a skeptic) to support these feminists and that women should not be surprised when their attempts at eliminating inequality make them unwelcome in this skeptical community.

When you have moderators and board administrators saying these things, it actually should come as no surprise to you when your podcast-affiliated forum becomes a place to say things like women who feel strongly enough about these positions must be mentally ill, that women should expect harassment because it’s natural for men to do it, that women who have abortions are executioners, that women having acid thrown in their faces is a topic to mock, that that false rape accusations are rampant (7/1/12, posted by the board admin) (NOTE: Since writing this post, I’ve started documenting the new ones that I encounter, as of July 11, 2012, you know, for fun, and because I am a bitter shrew with too much time on my hands.), harassment policies hurt conference organizers (7/3/12, posted by the board admin), that rape is sometimes funny (7/10/12), that there’s a thread just of women’s boobs for people to look at (and not the boobs of forum members posted willingly, either–just random boobs from women who probably did not give their permission to have those pictures posted by those people in that online space), that it doesn’t really matter if there are women in the movement or not because they treat all people as equal and it’s offensive to men to say that women should be recruited. And when I send email to the panel pointing out the discrepancy between this atmosphere and their stated desire for more women to participate, and pointing out how moderation creates this discrepancy, I get back in writing from the panel that they do not expect their moderators to take neutral stances (and that requiring them to do so is the opposite of what the goals are for the forum), that allowing conversations like this makes it “worth the time” of active participants, that they believe the forum moderators and participants do “a very good job of policing themselves and keeping conversations fair and respectful.” That if I don’t find this to be the case, I have to take it up with these very same moderators, but that the panel in no way endorse an anti-woman stance. Which leaves me wondering if they even know what an anti-woman stance looks like.

If you are wondering where the women in your community are, you have to look at things like forum content, like moderation policy, like tone. Like who you designate to act on your behalf, with your approval. Who represents you. If this is the SGU Forum, it reflects the SGU Podcast, and there’s no way around it. Their name is on it. They link to it from their website. They defend their moderators. If there are anti-woman aspects of this place, they are responsible for it. It’s hard to take seriously conversations about the lack of women participating in skepticism when all this trouble is playing out in general discussion on this public forum and they say that’s all aligned with their goals for the forum in the first place.

Maybe the forum isn’t a very important or significant corner of the skeptical community, and therefore the hassle of managing it differently is outweighed by the benefits and giving some fringe group a place to be a fringe group doesn’t seem like a very big risk. You could make the case that only a hundred people or so visit there regularly. But you could also make the case that there are 11,000 members (as the board administrator has made before). Maybe 11,000 is also a small fringe group of skeptics in the large scheme of things, and still is no big deal. But maybe that’s a lot of people watching this place, and maybe judging it, and maybe questioning its purpose, and maybe even questioning the motives of a panel that keeps it in place. Maybe it is fun for some people. But what does that say about those people? And if pleasing them is just as important as welcoming women to your community, maybe welcoming women isn’t very important, in which case you could save yourself a lot of controversy and stop talking about the discrepancy between men and women skeptics as if it’s something that matters to you. Or maybe if you don’t want this dubious association between the podcast and the forum, you can hand the forum off to a third party to run under a different name or shut it down all together.*

*Save your breath. That is not censorship. Don’t even bring it up.

And maybe, Gentle Reader, this applies to another forum, or blog, or in-person event, or membership group that you are responsible for, and you can go to the universal from this specific example of what not to do if your goals are to make women feel welcome in your community.

/pointed critique

Addendum, June 19
After a flurry of activity, the SGU Forum moderators have decided to keep all the naked pictures, albeit add one more level of hassle to accessing it. It’s not because they want to make the board more welcoming to women; it’s because they don’t want the naked stuff to be so easy to use against them. And they still don’t want women around who are going to “browbeat” men about inequalities and stuff. Threads here and here. This was a very thorough demonstration of how to uphold the status quo. It is an example of wanting to not appeal to most women but not wanting most women to criticize them for it. I predict there will be no change in demographics of this forum in the future, but they did admit changing the demographics was not their goal.

The new section is described as below:

Explicit (NSFW) Access
READ THIS: Explicit (NSFW) Access is a membergroup that will give you access to the Explicit (NSFW) subforum, a place which contains content with adult, objectionable, and politically incorrect themes. By clicking on “Join Group”, you acknowledge that you understand the nature of this subforum, and will not discuss this subforum with anyone outside of the subforum itself. The contents of this subforum do not reflect the views or opinions of SGU, SGU Forums moderators or administrators, or any of their affiliates or sponsors.

So it’s got all the adult themes you want, plus a promise to not discuss it with anyone outside of the section, so that no one outside the discussion board can find out about it because they don’t want to look bad. They don’t say what will happen if you do. And the last line about how it doesn’t reflect the views of the SGU podcast, the forum moderators or administrators is a bunch of crap, because the SGU podcast lends its name to the whole enterprise and it was the forum moderators and administrators who cooked the scheme up. And at this point their sponsors and affiliates are blameless, but once they find out about the subforum, they’re all complicit too. It’s a ridiculous sentence.

And it’s totally OK for me to say this outside of that subforum, because I did not join the group, so the restriction doesn’t apply.

Addendum, September 18
I was alerted a while ago via Twitter from an SGU forum member about moderation changes, so I went and scoped it out. Forum announcement and discussion here. The new moderators assure the community that they liked the way the moderation had been handled so far and were aiming to keep it that way. And that seems to be true, because in that thread a conversation popped up about swear words (and then was split off into another forum section here, and whether it was worse to make jokes about women posters’ pussies than to use the word fuck. Transitions are always rocky, and I’m sure the moderators and community members will adapt to the change pretty smoothly, and everyone seems happy enough, and they still may someday entertain the idea of making the forum environment friendlier to women, and that is all I have to say about that.

For now… (Does that sound ominous? I pronounced it ominously in my head when I typed it. But that’s probably it.)

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22 Responses

Let me summarize what I got from your post and the links you gave and a little bit what made it difficult:

1. There were real instances of harassment
2. Women bloggers responded to the instance
3. Many in the community responded negatively to the women bloggers

I started out reading and it was all about #3, and while there’s nothing wrong with that, the complete and total absence of details from #1 made it really really hard to keep reading and forming any opinion.

Before I had any sense of the original claims that started it. Otherwise, it looked like people getting mad at people for getting mad, and then that iterating infinitely.

The idea that leaders in the organization didn’t believe the claims and didn’t take it seriously seems to be at the heart of the matter to me. This is the first that I’ve read anything about the involvement of women in the skeptics movement. That is rather unfortunate, as my impression of the movement and the names associated with it has taken a pretty big hit.

If you are confused about the dustup regarding TAM and women bloggers or want more information, you’re going to have to read up elsewhere on it (the link you cite has some good resources to follow up with). I wrote here about how discussion board and message forum leadership affect the climate of discussion boards and messages forums, and where responsibility lies for that. The intro paragraphs about TAM and Rebecca Watson were just to set the stage for the thread I linked to from that message board, from which I draw examples (ie, the screen shot).

I’m glad your eyes have opened up! But it’s OK… it’s alright if I left because I felt offended. It was a voluntary association, and no one was interested in changing the atmosphere, and it wasn’t doing any good for me to get upset about other people’s values (we all want different things). And I started this blog instead, where I could run things exactly the way I want, so win-win! Thank you, also, for dropping by. I appreciate readers.

I did let a mod know I was leaving and said it was for a specific reason (although I didn’t spell out the reason), but there wasn’t any follow-up.

Just stumbled across your blog today and thought I’d drop in to say “hi” and comment on this entry as I’ve been a member at the sguforums for a few years now (not sure if you’d remember me or not). Not sure if you’re aware but there’s been a pretty spirited discussion going on for the past few days around the topic of what to do with the explicit section (if anything) and specifically the boobs and ass threads.

Without rehashing everything (I’m still working through precisely how I feel about it all) I’ve been one of the ones advocating the removal of what I call the drool threads. I also have in the past been a contributer, consumer, and commenter on these threads (full disclosure right :)?), but I honestly never thought about how it might make others feel. When it was expressed to us that several women were uncomfortable because of it, it became clear as day. Would we be ok with a TAM dedicating a room to the discussion of hot bewbs? Would 6 guys sharing a table in the corner at every Skeptics in the Pub fly for long?

To me; making, distributing, and viewing images of naked women for the purposes of sexual arousal is not a bad thing. It’s not amoral or inadvisable either, but the context of where you do these things matters a great bit. There’s such a thing as simply being polite and considerate to those who may not enjoy such things. The differences we seem to be having over this at the forum though, seems to boil down to whether being considerate in this case is opening the door for making allowances for removing profanity or any other topics that may offend others or make them uncomfortable.

What are your views on these things specifically if you don’t mind my asking?

Ha! Yes, I’ve noticed the spirited debate. It was linked to somewhere by Beleth on the Almost Diamonds blog (or else another thread was, and then I saw this one), but I appreciate that you pointed it out to me, especially since my name keeps getting tossed around in it. It would be weird to not know I was involved in it, however incidentally.

I don’t really have views on these things specifically, though. I don’t think the board should change in any way that goes against its goals. It’s up to the people who run the place how they want it to be and what courses of actions will best achieve their goals.

IF–big if, because I don’t think it’s clear at all that this is a goal for the SGU Forums–IF it’s considered a point of concern that so few women are active participants in the discussion board, and board leaders want to change that, my view specifically is that they should find out from women who don’t post there why they don’t post there, and act on that information. Lots of women who don’t post on the forums have said why in other blogs and other places, so it wouldn’t be hard to find out what their reasons are. If the sacrifice of changing to appease them is too great, don’t do it. Let them stay away. If there are lots and lots of women saying they don’t like to see profanity, and you want to know if it’s fair for them to say they won’t post there unless the profanity is disallowed, my answer is that it doesn’t matter. If these people are the audience you are trying to attract and they’ve given you the terms of their participation, they are the ones with the power in the negotiations. You kind of have to do what they say. But if you don’t want them around, you are the ones with the power, and you can ignore the changes they recommend.

I’m not really sure what exactly you are asking, honestly. Are there lots of women saying they don’t post at the forum because of the curse words? Is this an actual issue? Or is it just a wheel-spinning exercise to worry about it, instead of making any changes?

But it’s the big IF that people should be discussing, in my opinion. Does anybody want a more balanced gender ratio in the first place? What are the motivations for discussing the lack of women at all? It seems like lots of people were happy enough with the gender balance the boards had. It’s probably a waste of time to debate solutions to a problem that people may not agree even exists. Unless it’s all just for fun, in which case not a waste of time. But it’s not productive. The conversation won’t end up anywhere, and the people hoping to get results out of it will end up frustrated.

Thanks for responding! Sorry, I wrote like 5 paragraphs and ended it with a “so what do you think?” Not exactly a direct question. I was meaning to ask you more about the nature of erotica, its distribution, and its consumption.

For my part on the site changing, as much as I actually want for women to feel more welcome, I don’t know how much removing the boobs and ass threads will help as I don’t know how many members are turned away by it. As such, the decision for me is simply based on what I think is the right thing to do. If it helps us attract or keep more women then great, but as women seem to be in a minority within the skeptical community anyway, I’d wager whatever the problems are, are more deeply rooted.

Also, I meant to ask you about some of the claims you made about the forum’s history. Was there really a thread mocking women who’d had acid thrown on their face by multiple people? That one stuck out at me, but I was pretty darn active for a while and I don’t really remember seeing a lot of the more shocking examples you gave. Any idea where I might look for them?

There really was such a thread. I found it again via the forum search, but it was moved to Explicit and now it is gone. The “Pro-Life Atheists” thread had the abortions/execution thing. I don’t know what other examples I gave were shocking, but I will say that the search works best when you start from the forum home page instead of inside one of the forum categories. I realized that tonight with the acid search, which kept coming up with zero until I figured it out.

I didn’t answer the question regarding erotica, its consumption, or its distribution, because it’s off-topic for this blog and I haven’t given it much thought and it’s been said elsewhere better by lots of other people, I’m sure, but if that was brought up to get a response from me regarding how threads dedicated to the presentation of pictures of naked women makes a skeptical discussion board a less friendly place for women, I shared some ideas way over on the Almost Diamonds blog, in a long comment (which maybe one person read) at the tail end of a long conversation that included the SGU Forums specifically, and you can read it there.

Another semi-longtime SGU poster here. I actually do think in theory that having an opt-in Explicit sub forum for those who have yet to discover the Internet could “work”, and by “work” I mean “die a slow, quiet death that allows all parties to save face.” I like the principle that skepticism ought to allow all types, and although I certainly wouldn’t have a porn forum in there myself, it’s been there for a long time and as such people – yes, even skeptics – are irrationally attached to the status quo.

The issue that I have is that the reality of Explicit is that it’s a lot more than just “lol bewbs”. It’s kind of a safe haven for people who want to relate things happening in their lives without having search engines tying that stuff in with their usernames. Over the past years I’ve seen at least a couple members express suicidal thoughts and get talked down, discuss issues like messy divorces or other issues which could get them into legal hot water if they were public, and otherwise admit to embarrassing things online. I myself created a fairly long-running thread about OKCupid which has morphed: over time into a “commiserate about your dating experiences here” kind of thing.

I think that cultivating a sense of community and providing safe places to talk like this are exactly the kinds of things that a group of skeptics should want to do when trying to invite women; indeed, another skeptical board I’ve been active on in the past has a similar dynamic and is pretty close to having a 50/50 male/female split (the message board attached to snopes.com). However, this decision has the effect, intended or no, of attempting to quash that. It says “hey, you’re a skeptic and are feeling really depressed and want to talk about it? Hope you like boobs and vaginas! Because just to vent in private you need to be okay with them!” Existing members -those who haven’t already left, at least – will probably opt in as before, but if anything this dissuades that class of person I think the skeptical movement needs the most from joining. It’s unbelievable, almost, and it makes me very sad.

So yeah, that’s why I scrambled my password tonight and logged out. I don’t imagine this will be perceived as anything more than attention-seeking (which is how the board perceives this blog) or will in any way help to effect meaningful change (if the wagons circled before, they sure as hell aren’t going to un-circle for Johnny Slick). I just, as much as I enjoy the company of so many members of the board, continue to be a part of a place which is behaving as though it was attempting to be almost gleefully anti-feminist.

I did stop short of requesting my account be deleted in hopes that the mods will back into a smarter decision than this. I’ve met a couple of them and in spite of this I still think they’re good people. Hopefully, if minds are changed about this, you’ll reconsider as well.

Hi, Johnny! Thank you for the read and for dropping by with a comment. I’m sorry you’re feeling sad about the whole thing right now (and it is depressing to give up on a place you’ve invested time in, I know that for sure), but I’ve found that staying in touch with skeptics via Facebook and Twitter have been as good as the original.

I agree with you on how the useful a place like the “new” Explicit board (the “Personal” one) is for building a sense of community (too bad about insisting on all the naked, though), and I’ll confess that I haven’t even scrambled my password for my log in. Maybe we’ll see each other there someday in the future. Who knows, right? And until then, the social networks. I don’t feel disconnected from Skepticism-As-a-Community very much at all.

But of course my blog is an attention-seeking endeavor. I had some issues I wanted to bring to people’s attention! What better way?

First, you have left out some crucial facts about the nature of the “pocket of dumb” thread. It wasn’t an unprovoked attack on Rebecca; it was in response to an attack Rebecca made against the forum via her Twitter account. https://twitter.com/rebeccawatson/status/208878204499398658
“To be clear, that forum is a pocket of dumb in a sea of awesome.”
Those are Rebecca’s words, about a forum she herself set up.

The forum is absolutely not engaged in a “fight against the women who are trying to make skepticism a more welcoming place for women.” Rather, we are *defending* ourselves against an attack by *one* woman, who quite frankly has no idea what she is talking about when it comes to the tone and culture of the SGU forum any more. To equate our defense against Rebecca’s attacks to an attack against all feminists in skepticism is beneath you and the reading comprehension skills I know you possess.

Second, the Addendum has some history behind it that you may find interesting. When I was searching for a solution to the problem of how to make the board friendlier to women while at the same time making as few current members ragequit as possible, I turned to the posts of a very well-spoken feminist whom I had exchanged some, um, not-entirely-sympathetic words with a few years ago. It was her opinion that harassment stemmed from having sexual content in a non-sexual context. The problem with the naked pictures, she said, was that they were “forcing sex into a context it doesn’t belong”.

I read a lot of your old posts, and came to the conclusion that it’s fine to have sexual content in a sexual context. So that’s what I did. The new Explicit subforum is defined to have a sexual context. I want to thank you for leading me to that conclusion.

One last thing. I wish I had listened better to you back in 2009. I apologize that I didn’t. The forum would be a better place today if I had.

Beleth, thank you for dropping by and leaving a comment, and for saying those nice things about my old posts. My reading comprehension is, however, fine. You’ve said very clearly at the forum that feminists who try to point out inequalities are not welcome, that you want women who are quiet examples of success who stir up no trouble instead of women who “browbeat” men on the boards, that you want more of the women who already tolerate the board’s environment and not the ones that disapprove of it, and that the goal of this whole enterprise was not to make anyone feel welcome but to make it less obvious the SGU Forums was hosting and protecting spaces for people to post lots of pictures of naked people in order to make it harder for critics to gather ammunition for their critiques. You’ve still got sexual content in a non-sexual context, no matter how many hoops you make people jump through to get to it. Which, it turns out, is only one hoop that you jump through just that one time you opt in. You’ve effectively changed nothing. You’ve just reinforced that the people who want naked pictures and skepticism at the same time will still get it and will still be protected from observation from outside viewers to the site, and that fact and its implications hover over every board interaction.

It is a difficult situation you found yourself in, yes, and I sympathize with the compromises you had to make, but you decided to placate the people who would leave if they weren’t allowed to post and look at naked pictures while at the SGU Forums instead of placating the people who are uncomfortable knowing that while they are engaging in discussions with skeptics some skeptics have an eye on the naked pictures in the same place, and who might otherwise have joined your community. You pleased some people and displeased others. No matter what you decided, that was going to happen, and it’s not a decision anyone thinks you came to lightly. And considering that your goal wasn’t really to draw more women to the site–that more women coming to stay would just be a side effect, which you wouldn’t sneeze at if they were the right kind of women like the specific women you gave examples of, but weren’t really aiming for–you’re probably going to get the results you want from these actions. So you probably made the right decision for your group.

Your assessment of the new Explicit setup remains factually incorrect. It’s clearly defined as having a sexual context. I really don’t know how that can be misunderstood or misinterpreted as you continue to do.

The board is, as you know, designed to be an intellectually-challenging environment for rational, polite discussion. Browbeating, no matter who does it, is not polite, therefore it will find no home on the forum. That’s hardly the same thing as not wanting people to point out inequalities.

Thank you for acknowledging that my position is difficult. It is. Since I can’t please everyone, I will start to focus my efforts on pleasing whom I can please and stop wasting energy on people who are obviously unwilling to be pleased.

Oy, I wish I hadn’t read this thread. I had no idea that there were pictures of naked women being posted on the SGU forum. That hardly sounds like “an intellectually challenging environment for rational, polite discussion”. It sounds like immature boys from highschool giggling over dirty magazines. How depressing. I thought men in the skeptical movement might be able to see things from women’s point of view. Maybe one day ….
Thanks for your blog .